“Get ready for Nick’s pick!” my dad would announce from the driver’s seat.
We were zooming down the Pennsylvania Turnpike toward our cousins’ house: Mom in the front with Dad, Andy in the carseat, and Mark and I on either side of him in the back.
Outside our windows, a blur of trees, smear of guard rail, and long, flat building raced by.
We all squinted, waiting for what came next.
Finally (or a millisecond later), at the far edge of that building, a small letterboard appeared.
It wasn’t bold and green like a highway exit sign. It was a simple white sign — the kind you saw everywhere back then — with rows of black capital letters, arrangeable in a thousand ways…
ONE MILLION SERVED at McDonald’s,
7:30 STAR WARS at the movie theater,
0.99 GALLON at the gas station. (The Iran Hostage Crisis had everyone saying it would soon be more than a dollar!)
But this wasn’t your average letterboard. It didn’t say any of those things. This one was smaller. Wiser. It changed every week.
Sometimes it had quotations, or idioms, or sales promotions, but our favorite messages arrived in the fall.
During football season, this sign predicted Eagles scores!
NICK’S PICK
EAGLES 24
DOLPHINS 10
We had to read fast.
Mark and I would shout it out, trying to beat each other to the punch.
Our parents would laugh. Sometimes Dad would say, “Apparently, Nick hasn’t been following the Eagles lately.”
Who was Nick? What were his credentials? And what did he know about the NFL?
Did he run an offline gambling ring (“online” wasn’t a thing yet).
Was he privy to their playbook? Did he have “a man on the inside” at Vet Stadium?
We didn’t know.
In fact, we didn’t even care. (Or at least I didn’t!)
Nick was an eternal optimist. That’s all that mattered.
He always predicted an Eagles victory.
We moved to a new house the summer before I turned 7.
Our new house was as far as I could possibly imagine from my cousins’ house — to be specific, 20 minutes away. We continued to see each other every weekend. It was only a tiny stretch of Turnpike.
Back then, I couldn’t envision a time when our families weren’t whole and intertwined. But time passes. Kids grow up and move. Tragedy strikes.
We’re still close in spirit, but like most families, we’ve become separated by geography and loss.
These days, it’s often just Mom and me in the car.
I’m the driver. And the car, if I do say so myself, is much cuter than our old station wagon.
It’s more fuel efficient too. Then again, gas costs four times as much.
But I'm happy to report — that letterboard sign still exists!
Every time we drive by, Mom and I crane our necks to see it — just in case Nick has made another pick.
He hasn’t. Not in a long time.
But once in a while, the sign says
GO BIRDS
and we look at each other and smile, like it’s a sign of something bigger.
Because for us, Nick’s Pick wasn’t just about football.
It was about love and optimism, and the syncronicity of family. It didn’t matter how moody my “tween” self had been before we left the house. It didn’t matter if Mark and I were fighting over “who’s on whose side” of the backseat. It didn’t even matter if Andy sang verse after verse of his never-ending toddler mantra, “Racing car, racing car, racing car, racing car, racing car….” (He turned out to be a musician.)
In that single moment, we stopped whatever we were doing in our wood-paneled Ford Country Squire and worked as a team. When Nick’s Pick came up, were all going in the same direction.
Life was as predictable and easy as scoring the extra point after a touchdown. And in my mind, it would always be that way.
Nick — whoever he was — brought us together as a family.
No matter how the Eagles did on Sunday, we had already won.
Rebecca
This postcard grew from a free-write about graffiti by Rolf Potts. (Yes, I know it has nothing to do with graffiti. That’s the magic of free-writes!) Thank you, Rolf! If you haven’t seen his newsletters, check them out here!
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